Weapons of Mass Construction

The Coup takes political rap to the next level

In the five years since the release of the last Coup album, Party Music, there have been enough high-octane political scandals to power the space shuttle. The poorly reasoned Iraq war, illegal spying tactics, Plamegate, the torture photos of Abu Ghraib, Tom DeLay's indictment, the botching of Hurricane Katrina -- you'd think the Coup's Boots Riley would be salivating over all this material, right?

Wrong.

Instead of writing lyrics based on this plethora of plotlines, the West Oakland resident found himself concentrating on composing instrumental tracks. "Everyone was like, 'There's 9/11, there's the whole war,' " says Riley. " 'The Coup album has to be important; it's going to make everybody listen to it and immediately start the revolution. It's got to deal with all these issues.' I really was trying to conceptualize that album, and I realized why I was just sticking to the music."

Boots Riley: Lefty hip-hop avatar.

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Riley had a classic case of pressure-induced writer's block -- until he came to an understanding. "It's always been me talking about my life and [my]relationships to the world and the system, and not the whole macro-political thing from a very objective standpoint. [The lyrics have] always been from a very subjective standpoint. Once I realized that that was okay, I started writing."

What Riley eventually came up with formed the basis of Pick a Bigger Weapon, the Coup's fifth LP, released in April. And while the disc features the act's usual strikingly detailed survival tales and rise-up anthems, it's also the most geopolitically charged Coup disc to date,offering the best (and rudest) dissection of the Bush-Hussein history ever set to a beat, not to mention the slinkiest song devoted to love before Armageddon.

"I feel like an album like this can be used right now," Riley says. "I think it can lend itself to the spirit that's already out there and change the situation that's going on in the world."

Raymond "Boots" Riley has been pushing for change ever since he was a kid. At 14, he started canvassing for the Progressive Labor Party and other left-leaning institutions. And while he rapped throughout high school, it wasn't until an incident in 1989 that he understood the power of hip-hop.

While working for the pro-communist International Committee Against Racism in San Francisco's Double Rock Projects, Riley heard from dozens of people about a then-recent instance of police brutality, in which several cops had allegedly beat a woman, Rossi Hawkins, along with her twin sons. When neighbors came out of their homes to investigate, the cops started shooting their guns into the air, causing the crowd to scatter every which way. Just as suddenly, however, the masses altered their course and returned, separated the police from their victims, and sent the law scurrying out of the neighborhood, without their guns or cars.

"When you heard the story from different people, little bits would be changed here and there," Riley recalls. "But the part of the story that didn't change -- no matter who told it, whether it was an old lady telling it or a young man -- was that at the point when the crowd starting running away, somebody started chanting, 'Fight the power! Fight the power! Fight the power!' This was the summer of '89, and Public Enemy's 'Fight the Power' was all over the radio. And that chanting of 'Fight the power' influenced everybody to turn around and do what they thought was right. And right then I knew the power that music can have and the place it can hold. It can be a rallying cry; it can be an indicator of the thoughts and feelings of the people around you. And it can be a soundtrack to the things that you need to do."

Several years later, Riley formed the Coup with another MC named E Roc, whom he met while loading planes for UPS. After an initial deck jockey didn't work out, the pair convinced DJ Pam the Funkstress to join them. The group's debut LP, Kill My Landlord, which came out on Wild Pitch in 1993, featured "I Know You," Riley's retelling of the Double Rock story, along with shout-outs to the L.A. riots and The Communist Manifesto, all rapped over West Coast-style G-funk.

Undeterred by a marketplace overrun with gangsta rappers, the Coup released its second LP, Genocide and Juice,the following year. Eviscerating the sophomore slump, the group added sly humor and tighter beats to its socialist stew, offering sendups of corporate wiggers and repo men. Steal this Album (1998) was even better, with the departure of E Roc adding more coherence and allowing Riley's storytelling talents to shine brightly on epic tracks like "Me and Jesus the Pimp in a '79 Granada Last Night."

Despite these three remarkable albums, the Coup remained an underground phenomenon until 2001, when it became famous for...a piece of cover art. The image for Party Music, shot several months before 9/11, featured Riley and Pam igniting explosions in the World Trade Center towers with drumsticks and a guitar tuner, at precisely the points where the terrorists struck. The act's label, 75Ark, altered the image before it was released, but not before the FBI came a-calling. (At the end of the year, the Coup received vindication of a sort when its disc came in at No. 8 on the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop poll.)